


the cottage by the sea

by layersofsilence



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, MerMay, Merpeople, Merperson Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 03:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14803812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/layersofsilence/pseuds/layersofsilence
Summary: Later, he could not say why he did what he does. His mind is one confused, high-pitched blur, incoherent and blank, but perhaps that is a good thing, because if he’d been thinking he likely would have remained where he was, paralysed by indecision, until his handlers arrived and took him in.As it is – the Asset stands and leaves. And, eventually, the result is this: a flash in the water and a wet, gleaming head that emerges from the sea, so smoothly that even the water doesn’t seem to realise he’s there until it does, and little waves start flocking around him.





	the cottage by the sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [littleblackfox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleblackfox/gifts).



> for the super wonderful [fox](http://thelittleblackfox.tumblr.com), who is not only super wonderful but also making a kickass mersteve to go with this story!! we've been blessed  
>   
>   
>   
> and there's one more down in the end notes, if you need the motivation to make it down there ;)

It starts like this: the Asset peers down the scope of a rifle, and hesitates.

His target is unremarkable in and of himself, one among a vague blur of faces that the Asset has seen since he was woken and briefed. That briefing had stated that the target was a genius, but given his supremely terrible choice in dwellings – he’s chosen an apartment that is utterly indefensible, and it’d been child’s play to find a position to shoot from – that genius is somewhat doubtful, in the Asset’s mind. Then again, he’s not sure that is particularly remarkable, either.

No, what is remarkable about him is that according to the briefing his wife and child were away visiting family; the target is supposed to be alone, and he is not. His wife has returned from her trip a day early, child in tow. She is draped around his shoulders; the child is clutching the target’s knee. The Asset sees a dimple on her right cheek and a matching one in their child’s wide grin, and his finger slides off the trigger of his rifle seemingly of its own accord.

The target draws his curtains closed. The Asset has missed the shot.

His handlers will be disappointed. For all his blank mind, this was drilled into him before even his briefing: he is the Fist of HYDRA, the Winter Soldier, their Asset. Failure is not an option. He is not supposed to hesitate.

And yet – the woman’s smile had looked almost familiar. The Asset does not know why, but – but he _wants_ to know. He does not think he is supposed to want things, either.

Later, he could not say why he did what he does. His mind is one confused, high-pitched blur, incoherent and blank, but perhaps that is a good thing, because if he’d been thinking he likely would have remained where he was, paralysed by indecision, until his handlers arrived and took him in.

As it is – the Asset stands and leaves.

~*~

The Asset sneaks into an apartment at random and steals a wallet, and spends the night on an overnight bus headed to a destination he hadn’t quite caught the name of at the ticket stand. He doesn’t know how he knows to do these things, but when he thinks _I need to get out_ his body reorients him to the nearest bus depo, and he’s not about to question that, not now. His brain is running in circles until his entire body feels dizzy and sore with it, until he shivers in his seat even though it is not cold. Then it runs more, until the Asset is very, very tempted to take a knife to it to make it stop.

But he does not. The woman’s smile had been familiar. The _child’s_ smile had been familiar. He needs to remember why, and knife wounds to the brain tend to cause processing to become sub-optimal.

That makes him think about other parts of him that may need to have knives taken to them. Before the mission had started, his handlers had put a tracker in the flesh of his upper arm; he’s willing to bet that there is another in his metal arm.

In the darkness that shrouds the back of the bus, he finds out that he’s right, because of course there are trackers in him. He pries the window next to him open and tosses the little square of metal he’d dug out of his flesh arm into the empty back of a pickup truck. The slightly larger square of metal from his metal arm goes into the open passenger window of a passing Volvo. The driver, eyes fixed on the road, does not notice.

The Asset resolves to take a metal detector to himself in the next town, and when he does he is nearly sidetracked by the arsenal he is carrying: he has to remove four guns, four knives, and a handful of bombs from various holsters around his body before the metal detector stops sounding like it’s dying every time it comes into close contact with his body. After all that, he still has to keep it away from his metal arm, but it does at least inform him that he needs to remove a second chip from his arm and two from his right leg. None of them look like trackers, which raises the concerning question of what they _are_ ; he crushes them all comprehensively anyway, and buys a ticket for another bus, heading further north.

~*~

This bus’s last stop is a medium-sized town that he does not realise he has visited before, and yet as soon as he gets off the bus and starts walking his shoulders tighten, his posture straightens, his body turns towards a specific apartment before remembering he has just made a break from the organisation that owns it. He does not remember being here but his muscles remember the place, remember what it had looked like and how to navigate the streets. HYDRA has a safehouse here, he remembers. It is not a safe town.

But, it makes him realise, there are other organisations that keep safehouses. All he needs to do is find one; his handlers would not look for him there.

The intelligence agencies are clustered, headquartered close together: Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland. The Asset hops on another bus – on the roof, this time, so as to avoid leaving a paper trail – and tunes himself out of his body when it starts to shiver again, this time because of the cold, cutting wind. He nearly can’t jump off at his stop, his body grows so stiff with it.

Every organisation, once he cases them, keeps a series of safehouses, which is unsurprising. What is surprising is that SHIELD keeps a series of small _defunct_ safehouses. The Asset does not know why, but he also doesn’t care. He looks through the addresses, steals the file that marks ownership of and contains the deed and keys to a small house on the edge of a small town by the sea, and departs once again.

~*~

The small cottage is what makes everything click, in the Asset’s mind. He sees it; he hears the beating of the surf on the sand and inhales the salt in the air and he thinks, _Becca would’ve liked to live here,_ and then he thinks _oh, that’s why I chose this address,_ and then he thinks _wait, who’s Becca?_

It makes him sit down, right where he is in the front yard. He can’t bring himself to enter the house without knowing what brought him here.

The sun has arched over him by the time that he remembers he’d had a sister, by the time he remembers who she’d been and what she’d been like. And that, that is truly revolutionary in many ways: first being the feeling of utter rightness at the thought of her, something that he has not felt in years; but second is the fact that the Asset had a _sister,_ a small gap-toothed girl with a voracious mind and restless fingers, with long hair she’d made him braid and, later, a stylish bob she refused to let him touch. Rebecca Barnes _sings,_ bright and clear in the Asset’s mind.

That woman, he thinks. That woman, with her dark hair and her wide smile and her narrow, pretty face, the dimple in her right cheek: she had reminded the Asset of his sister. It is, perhaps, the best thing anyone has done for him in a long time.

And, with the memory of a small sister smiling up at him, unable to properly say the mouthful that is _James Buchanan,_ the Asset can only surrender, however tentatively, and become Bucky Barnes once more.

~*~

There are hesitant footsteps behind him. The Asset – Bucky – contemplates running inside, hiding, but these are not the footsteps of anyone who means him harm, he thinks.

“Hello?” a tentative, elderly voice reaches out. “Are you moving in?”

“Yes,” Bucky says as he stands, horribly aware of the way he looms, the dark things he’s dressed in, the way he doesn’t fit into this pastoral image of a seaside cottage at all.

“Oh, good,” the lady at the gate says, and somehow extracts a casserole from her apparently deceptively small bag. The Asset has been sitting still for so long that a woman who had seen him walk through the streets when he’d first arrived had had the time to make a casserole. “I made you a welcoming gift.”

“…Oh,” Bucky manages, and, as is only polite, moves closer to take it. His stomach chooses that moment to remind him that he hasn’t eaten since he’d been given six energy bars during his mission briefing. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” the lady beams. She is wearing gumboots, and her hair curls recklessly around her face. “You need anything, just give me a holler. I live two streets down, the house with the yellow door. You can’t miss it.” She leans forward, speaks in the tone of a confession: “My wife insisted we hadta buy the brightest yellow there was, ‘cos it’d fade out. Three years later and our door’s still brighter than a banana.”

Bucky nods and doesn’t clamp down on the smile that twitches the corners of his mouth. “I’ll remember,” he says, which seems to satisfy the lady. She pats him on the arm and departs.

When he turns back to the house it seems to twinkle out at him like something out of another world, a little cottage by the blue blue sea. And yet, for all its charming innocent quaintness, Bucky can’t quite shake the feeling that he is an interloper here: too tall and too dark and too ragged around the edges to fit in a place like this. _You don’t belong here,_ the house seems to say with its aggressively cheerful image. Bucky has to resist the urge to apologise to the place as he juggles his casserole and his keys and manages to pry the door open.

The interior of the house is clean, smells vaguely like lavender and sandalwood, and has the bare minimum of furniture: a table, some chairs, a sofa, all covered carefully with dust sheets. There are holes in the wall where pictures had hung and stark spots on bare wood that are, approximately, the size of a plant pot. It makes Bucky wonder who had lived here before SHIELD had taken over the place, makes him wonder where they are now. Makes him wonder what made them leave, when the house had so clearly loved them. Those blunt spots seem to glare at him: _you’re not meant to be here,_ they repeat. He can’t help but agree.

The rest of the house is just as unfriendly: the floorboards creak unhappily under Bucky’s heavy bulk, and shadows gather behind lumps of furniture. The smell of lavender and sandalwood is weak, has been fading, but vestiges remain stubbornly, clinging to folds in curtain fabric or sheltering in the corners of rooms, leaping out to startle him whenever he so much as touches anything.

Bucky needs supplies, needs food and water and – and probably other, human, things. He doesn’t have the slightest idea of where to begin, but he has a casserole and a tap that flows and that will do for now. He potters around the house, taking the dust sheets off the furniture, shaking them out carefully at the back door, folding them up and placing them in a cupboard. He catalogues the supplies that he has: a few cleaning implements, beneath the sink. A mop and hoover in a small closet. Kitchenware and plates and crockery for two. A refrigerator, a bed with a mattress, a low small table.

It feels macabre and strange to lie in a bed in an empty house on the very fringes of a small neighbourhood, no matter that he’d purposefully chosen the room that was clearly the spare, clearly less lived in. Then again, his very presence in this house seems macabre and strange. He feels vaguely as though it would be easier not to be Bucky Barnes, here; when he was the Asset he had not cared how houses had felt about him.

The sound of the sea filters through the closed window, steady and repetitive, and that is eventually what lulls Bucky to sleep.

~*~

He’d done nothing but potter around the cottage for the entire day and eat the offered casserole, so it makes sense that Bucky would be woken up by the lightest tough of morning sunlight on his face. It still feels absurdly like a rejection: the house having opened its curtains just enough to let the light in, to wake him up and remind him to leave.

Bucky is not going to leave, because that would be deeply tactically unsound. He’s found himself a good location, and he refuses to let a house drive him away. His decision to take a walk on the beach, he tells himself, is purely logical: a check of the wider perimeter. It has nothing to do with how absurdly unwelcome he feels in the house he’s staying in. 

At least, he intends to do a wider perimeter check. As soon as he goes down to the beach – something seems to derail, just a little. The sea is there, strong and briny and endless, the colour of jade today, stretching out into the horizon, and he finds himself drawn to it, close and closer.

He wouldn’t be able to justify, later, why he slipped into the water; the beach is closed for the season and utterly barren, and there’s a reason for that. The water is _cold_ , but – it just _looked_ inviting, in a way that nothing else in his life seems to be, right now. When even the house he’s staying in glared at him for being the wrong person to open its doors and lie in its bed, the waves crashing onto the shore had seemed to beckon him hopefully, saying come out a little further, come play, it’ll be fun…

Whatever the reason, the result is this: Bucky Barnes, standing mostly by virtue of a shoulder-height rock that he’s leaning heavily on, half because he wants its kind steady unwavering support and half because he needs it, playful waves knocking into his knees and attempting to comfort him. The result is this: Bucky Barnes, sliding down the smooth rock face until he’s sitting in freezing knee-deep waves that are able to reach his chest, now that he’s let his knees give out. He can’t even find it in himself to worry that his metal arm with short-circuit until it’s submerged in seawater and he realises that, fuck, maybe he should have thought about that before he stuck it in the sea.

His eyes are unexpectedly hot. He doesn’t realise why until he sees a tiny droplet side off his nose and into the sea, and the sight makes something inside him crack open, flings the floodgates wide.

Tears slide down his face entirely without his consent, a disconnect between himself and his tear ducts because his mind his blank of memories but filled with procedure, because he had been on a mission to kill a man, because he remembers his sister, and the gap in her teeth, and the way she stubbornly refused to call him James until the entire neighbourhood had called him Bucky. The tears keep coming because he doesn’t know how long it’s been since he’s seen her, since she punched him for getting drafted and kissed his cheek on the platform of a crowded train station. He knows without being told that it has been a long, long time.

His tears make little plopping noises that he has to listen for, under the noise of waves against sand. It seems fitting, for salt water to go to salt water.

The result is this: there is a flash in the water and a wet, gleaming head emerges from the sea, so smoothly that even the water doesn’t seem to realise he’s there until it does, and little waves start flocking around him.

“Oh,” Bucky says, quiet because his throat hurts and he’s not sure that he currently has the capacity of emotion to handle injecting surprise into his tone.

The man pulls his tail upwards in a mimicry of Bucky’s own drawn-up knees, and then wraps his arms around himself. His tail is blue and shining, softly gradient from dark to light blue, the sun drawing out spots of shine from it. His eyes match the deep dark blue at his waist and they never waver from Bucky, bright and gentle.

“Why –?”

“Your tears,” the man says, quiet, “into the sea.”

Bucky frowns, because his mind and memories might be soup, but that rings a bell. Except – “I thought that was for selkies.”

The man – the merman – tilts his head to one side. “I have a cousin with a seal skin, if you want to talk to him.”

“No!” Bucky exclaims, and then retreats into himself, trying not to blush. He just – doesn’t want the man to leave, doesn’t want to be alone just yet. “No, I – this is fine. I just,” he continues, and comprehensively loses the battle with his blush, “I just – does that make you come up? Did you have to –?”

“No,” the merman says. “I didn’t have to. I’m not even supposed to.”

“You’re not?”

“No,” the merman says again, soft. “But you just –” he reaches out as though to touch Bucky’s face, and then retracts his hand self-consciously. Bucky is slightly surprised to find that he doesn’t think he would mind the touch of that hand on him. “You were so sad,” the man says. “So I came anyway.”

His face is something that – could be fearsome, probably, if he wanted it to be, and yet instead it is endlessly soft. He is beautiful, not in the unnatural, all-consuming way that makes people lose all thought and becomes untrustworthy for its intensity but simply. Gently. It shouldn’t be possible to trust someone after barely minutes have passed since meeting them, after only broken and confused words have been exchanged, and yet. The merman looks at Bucky with such tenderness and concern that it’s – for all that a part of Bucky’s mind was objecting, and loudly, it’s impossible to truly question his intentions.

“I’m Bucky,” he blurts out, before he can convince himself not to. “Bucky Barnes.”

“Bucky Barnes,” the merman repeats, very carefully, as though to affix it in his memory. It’s infuriatingly endearing, already, barely minutes after they’ve met. “I’m Steve Rogers.”

“Steve Rogers?” Bucky asks, not a little incredulously. He doesn’t think it’s so unreasonable to have expected a slightly stranger name.

Steve looks self-conscious, though, leans back a little. “Is it a bad name? I don’t know. I chose it. I can’t say my actual name above water.”

“You can’t?”

“No,” Steve repeats. “The sound, it –” he gestures a little, short and sharp and frustrated, “it carries differently. Sounds weird.”

“Where’d you get Steve Rogers?”

“A shipwreck.”

“…Huh,” Bucky says. Steve reaches out one hand and taps on Bucky’s chest. There’s thin webbing between his fingers, gauzy blue and translucent.

“This isn’t normal clothes,” he says, and it’s only then that Bucky realises he hasn’t changed since leaving his rifle behind; he is still wearing his utility jacket, and that is open his Kevlar is peering out. “I know it’s not. It looks uncomfortable.”

“It’s…not,” Bucky admits. “Not normal clothes, I mean.”

“I know, I said that,” Steve says, and he seems to be emboldened by the fact that Bucky hadn’t pushed him away or flinched at that tap to his chest, because now those strange long-fingered hands are creeping around the edge of the Kevlar, tugging ineffectually. “Why are you wearing it?”

“I – don’t know,” Bucky says dumbly, because he doesn’t. He could have taken it off at any point between leaving his targets behind and now, and yet – he hasn’t. He hadn’t even thought to.

It feels strange, shrugging his jacket off and unzipping his vest in front of someone else’s curious eyes. The Kevlar peels off him, sticky with his sweat and from being pressed against him for so long. He’s still wearing the simple black shirt that goes under all his tactical gear, but he feels naked.

“Better?” Steve asks, and Bucky can only give him a small, tight smile.

“Think so,” he says.

“Is this –” Steve says hesitantly, and then pauses, reaching out to touch Bucky’s wet face, very gentle. “Why you were –?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky says. “I don’t remember much. I don’t – I don’t think I was a good person.”

Steve looks at him, long and evaluating, and Bucky finds himself holding his breath. It’s not until Steve says, “Nah, don’t think so,” that he realises how very badly he wanted – needed, maybe – Steve to disagree with him.

“What d’you know,” he mutters anyway, because apparently he is bound and determined to make himself miserable. “I was sent to kill a man.”

“Did you?”

“…Yes,” Bucky says, and adds, defiantly, when Steve pulls a sceptical face, “Maybe not this time, but before. They knew what I was good at.” They’d briefed him like the result of his mission was never in doubt, just a formality.

His eyes burn again, and he scrubs at them, rough. He doesn’t need to bring any more merfolk up to witness this.

Steve makes a distressed noise, a click and a trill and something Bucky’s never heard before, and reaches out. “Don’t, don’t,” he says, grasping lightly at Bucky’s wrist. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

_So let me_ , Bucky wants to say, but Steve forestalls him by shifting, the movement of his tail one long sinuous ripple as he moves to sit next to instead of opposite to Bucky. His wet skin presses damp patches into the parts of Bucky that have managed to stay dry so far, but Bucky finds that he doesn’t mind. He kind of, even, wants Steve to grab at his wrist again. Wants to move his wrist in a way that would invite grasping, but he doesn’t know how to do that, barely knows how to be graceful, only cleanly efficient, and even that is slowly shuddering out of his brain.

Steve flicks his tail, sending drops of water splashing upwards. The fanned-out fin at the end of his tail floats just below the surface of the water, and the play of the waves and sea foam on top of it is the most beautiful thing Bucky thinks he has ever seen. Not, it is worth mentioning, that Bucky has a lot of basis for comparison, but he feels as though even if he had a lifetime’s worth of memories, ten lifetimes’ worth of memories, this would still be beautiful, this moment.

“People think a lot of things,” Steve says gently. “Lot of them are wrong.”

Bucky doesn’t think he makes a noise, makes a face, but Steve takes it upon himself to explain himself anyway.

“They think merfolk aren’t real, don’t they?” he asks, nudging Bucky with his tail, one long rippling nudge.

“I guess it’s good to know that hasn’t changed,” Bucky tries. He doesn’t remember a single thing about merfolk from when he was younger.

Steve hums. “When were you younger?” he asks, and Bucky has to shrug. “You’re right, anyway,” he says. “Sometimes I visit this town, because I like it, but I don’t think people know where I come from, where I go.”

“The sea,” Bucky murmurs on an exhale, not quite a question but a request for confirmation. Steve obliges, hums out assent.

“They’re good at not asking questions. At welcoming strangers. It’s why I like it. You could like it, too,” he says, his voice slow and sweet and dreamy. Bucky’s not entirely sure what to say in response to that, but he doesn’t need to: Steve is perfectly content where he is, not saying a word, and slowly Bucky relaxes into the gentle silence, too.

He doesn’t know how long the two of them sit there together, loose-limbed and close, in a cold sea that seems to warm up just by having Steve near. Time seems to warp and drift, honey-slow and loose, dripping past in a way that seems distinctly unreal. And, somehow, it helps. Bucky’s mermaid takes all his leaden weighted loneliness and transmutes it into golden silence spun softly between them, alchemy wrought with no ingredients and all the more magical for it.

“Are you going to come back?” Bucky asks, before he can think better of it, once he starts to feel Steve shifting beside him, soft short movements that nevertheless signal the beginnings of restlessness.

“Do you want me to –?”

“Yes,” Bucky blurts out, before Steve can even finish his sentence. “Yeah, I do.”

Steve smiles at him, a little shy. “Okay,” he says simply. “I’ll come back.”

“Okay,” Bucky parrots back to him, soft. “But – no, wait. If you come back –”

“When.”

“When you come back,” Bucky amends, trying to ignore the anticipation that sparkles through his stomach at the confirmation, “will it be because you want to? Or – because of the tears, and I asked you?”

Steve smiles, then, soft like a secret and lovely enough to distract Bucky from his question, from the importance of the answer. “Because I want to,” Steve says then, brushing a hand across Bucky’s wrist. Bucky can’t help the smile that crawls out of his chest, then; doesn’t want to, and the waves around him chatter as Steve returns the smile, brightness for brightness.

It doesn’t hurt, then, to watch Steve twist in a way that seems vaguely inhuman and dive back under the waves. Steve’s home is the sea, and that’s where he belongs: it closes ranks around him, cheerfully protective, and even Bucky’s sharp eyes can only catch a silvery-blue glimpse of a sleek long figure rushing out to the open sea. It wouldn’t be fair, he knows, to ask Steve to stay, and there’s something breathlessly joyful about knowing that Steve will come back, despite that. For one brief, breathless moment, Bucky finds himself wanting everything he can’t have: finds himself wanting to follow Steve out into the wide and endless blue.

As Steve disappears the water around Bucky grows colder, the sky and the beach less colourful, and Bucky sighs. He lets himself just sit, for a few moments longer, tries to steel himself for the unpleasant journey back to the house, and then forgoes preparation in favour of hauling himself up with the help of the solid steady rock behind him, and making his way back inland.

The sand of the beach sticks to his shoes and pants and every other part of him it can get to; the bulletproof vest leads a wet trail across the beach to accompany his footsteps. He’s going to have to find some way of disposing of it; wet Kevlar can pretend to be fine against small handguns, but it’ll tear like tissue paper at heavy-duty bullets, and from the small arsenal that Bucky himself had been carting around HYDRA doesn’t fuck around with small handguns.

The sea waves at his retreating back. Bucky has to stop himself from giving in to the irrational urge to promise it that he’ll come back. The sea, he has to tell himself sternly, is not sentient and does not care about his habits. Much like the house is not sentient and does not care that he’s trailing wet sand and saltwater across the floor, as much as it might seem to complain in creaks and groans.

Once he’s cleaned up the mess and himself, though, the house seems slightly more amenable to his tentative advances. Perhaps it is because it has looked through him and deemed him likeable – unlikely – or because he has just met a merman, and his heart is full to brimming with it. Bucky is slightly more inclined to believe the latter, no matter how illogical it is for a house to present itself as more agreeable because of one chance encounter he had experienced. Still: today the cracks seem to glare less, the windows are more open, and when the evening comes – sooner than Bucky had expected; he must truly have spent a while in the sea – the deep red and oranges of sunset paint the walls less violently.

~*~

Bucky awakens in much the same fashion as he had the morning before: no matter how tightly he shuts the blinds, that does nothing to stop the material from being thin and well-worn, and that in turn does nothing to stop sunlight creeping through it in the morning. Bucky is starting to understand why this room was designated as the guest room, and the main bedroom faced the opposite direction, faced the sea.

This morning, though, he has something to look forward to.

Or, at least, he has something to look forward to for a grand total of three blissful seconds before his brain decides to start functioning and ruin everything with questions: does he go to the beach? Did come back mean tomorrow? What was time like in the sea? How was Steve going to find him if he didn’t go back to the sea? Bucky’s not sure that he can cry again like he had yesterday, but if that’s how Steve’d found him – but it’d be impractical for him to spend his life in the sea –

He brutally pushes the questions out of his mind and decides to go shopping for groceries with the money he has remaining. He needs, he realises, to find some way to support himself. Stealing is unsustainable now that he is not on the move, but he is not sure what he can do instead. He suspects that nobody in this small town will be willing to pay him to kill people, which is the only thing that he knows he can do with any certainty.

The mussed bed seems to glare at him when he hauls himself out of it, so he sighs and pulls the sheets into some semblance of order behind him.

He takes the casserole dish with him, rinsed and scrubbed with an empty scouring pad because he’d had that but not soap. It came out alright, he thinks, and it feels like the only polite thing to do, to return the dish.

The lady had been entirely right, both about how easy her house would be to find and the brightness of her door. It is matched, however, by the brightness of her smile, when she opens the door to see Bucky there, slightly sheepish, offering the casserole dish.

“I’m glad you liked it, that’s all,” she says as Bucky tries to thank her. She waves her hand dismissively, with the casserole dish in it, and very nearly smashes the thing into the doorframe. “It’s always nice to have your cooking appreciated.”

“Actually, I was wondering,” Bucky says, “if you could direct me to the nearest store? The refrigerator is, well, a little bare right now.”

“Oh, honey,” the woman says, and proceeds to give him exact and painstaking instructions to the nearest convenience store but follows that up with a warning to buy as little as possible; there is a market on Saturday, she says, in the town square, and the food that is sold there is of infinitely better quality and of a wide enough range to sustain on without anything from the store.

“Val, stop talking,” another voice yells from upstairs, and the woman – Val – finishes her sentence with a roll of her eyes that somehow manages to be sheepish.

“You got all that?” she asks, and Bucky nods.

“Thank you again, ma’am,” he says, as polite as he can be, and departs.

He nearly misses the store despite the painstaking instructions, because somehow he sees it and it doesn’t register in his brain that this tiny neon bright storefront is what he’s looking for. When he finally does go inside the place is blindingly white and clean and in such straight uniform lines that it’s almost jarring. This could be a store in any city in the world, and Bucky probably would not be able to tell the difference.

The cashier by the door looks at him curiously but only nods once, cautiously friendly. Bucky nods back, tries to emit the same type of vibe. He isn’t entirely sure whether he succeeds.

This place is so ruthlessly uniform and soulless that it has the unwanted effect of bringing Bucky – back to reality is a bad phrase, because it makes him think that Steve hadn’t been real, but. Well. The phrase starts to hover at the back of his mind as he looks down at neatly packaged meat. And, well, what if yesterday had been Bucky’s imagination? It wasn’t out of the question, wasn’t even out of the realm of likelihood. For fuck’s sake, he didn’t remember a thing before being woken up and briefed and told to kill a man. Anyone with memory issues that big could probably have imagination issues just as concerning.

His merman had been real, he thinks, but it’s not as staunch as he wants it to be, more desperate. He had to’ve been real, because Bucky doesn’t think he could make that up. He doesn’t think he could make up that immediate bond he’d felt, the warmth and the want and the brief bittersweet sadness.

He’s just moved on to contemplating the flatteringly-lit but frankly terrible selection of fruits and vegetables and wondering whether he should wait until Saturday to eat fresh produce when there’s a sudden addition of weight to his shopping basket. When he looks down there’s an inexpertly wrapped package of unknown substance that he has no intention of accepting until he turns around and sees – what the fuck.

Steve is behind him, wearing a shy smile and standing on _two legs_. Clearly something very strange had happened in Bucky’s mind yesterday: he’d met the man, and somewhere along the way he’d changed the man’s legs to a tail.

“Hello,” Steve says, soft. Waves at Bucky, a little awkwardly, and then starts to recoil into himself when Bucky can only stare and try to think of what could have possibly happened last night to make him remember this man with a fish’s tail.

“I – hi,” Bucky says. “It’s – nice to see you?” He winces; the question mark is audible. “I mean, it’s nice to see you. Just, uh, wasn’t expecting it, I guess.” Wasn’t expecting to see you like _this_. But then, maybe he should have. Seeing someone with legs is a hell of a lot more common than seeing them with a fish’s tail.

Steve hums. Bucky decides that fruit can wait until Saturday, and when he walks up to the register Steve walks with him. Even offers to pay for him, which is – slightly odd, but nice, even if Bucky doesn’t take him up on it.

Fuck, but Steve doesn’t even look real as they leave the shop, looks more like the fairytale creature Bucky had imagined him to be with the way he shines. The sunlight loves him, of course it does, clutching at his curves and edges until Bucky could swear that he’s haloed in light.

“Did you, uh,” Bucky starts, and stops, not sure where he was going with that. “What’d you put in my basket?” he asks instead, peering into the bag it’d gone in. The thing remains lumpy and clumsily wrapped.

“A fish,” Steve says, rocking back and then forward on his heels. “Thought you could do with some food.”

“Oh,” Bucky says.

“Do you not like fish?” Steve asks, unaccountably anxious, his brows furrowing.

“I…don’t know,” Bucky says. “I don’t – uh, remember having any.”

Steve’s furrowed brow morphs into a proper frown, at that. But he looks at Bucky and it melts, just like that, and in a second Steve is biting his lip, swaying closer. “I could prepare it for you?” he offers, and there’s something intimate about the way he says it, like this is precious. It makes Bucky blush.

“I’d like that,” he manages to get out, and Steve smiles gently. It feels as though he knocks the breath out of Bucky’s lungs, rude and abrupt, when he takes Bucky’s arm. When Bucky looks down – Steve’s hands do not have any webbing between them. Of course they don’t, he chides himself. That was – some crazy product of his imagination.

“Cooking fish,” Steve mutters as Bucky lets them into the house. He makes a beeline for the kitchen, looking around at what Bucky has.

“Oh, I can run back down to the shops and but more, if you need something,” Bucky offers. “I didn’t realise you’d be cooking for me.”

“I – no. Yes, maybe,” Steve says reluctantly. “We’ll see. Do you have the internet?” 

“Uh,” Bucky says. The name rings a bell, but –

“No, nevermind, it’s okay, I remember this,” Steve says, narrowing his eyes at the fish like he’s about to fight it. “I remember one recipe, at least. Go, go sit down”

“You don’t want an assistant?” Bucky asks, hovering in the doorway. “I think I’m good at chopping things.”

“You think?”

“How hard can it be?” Bucky asks. “Plus, it’s not like I can cut myself,” he reminds the pair of them, raising his metal hand and wiggling it. Something in Steve’s expression softens at that.

“Does it hurt?” he asks.

“It – no, it doesn’t,” Bucky says, serious because it’s impossible to be flippant in the face of Steve’s big concerned eyes. “It doesn’t, Steve, stop looking at me like that, you’ll cut yourself.”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t want you to be hurt, is all,” he mumbles down at the fish he’s filleting.

“I’m not,” Bucky says, and steps into the kitchen to help with the cooking, because he doesn’t want to just go sit down and Steve seems to have forgotten about telling Bucky to go sit down. Or, at least, he’s willing to let it slide for the moment. Probably the latter, if the way he narrows his eyes is any indication.

The two of them brush past each other every time they so much as move, it seems; the kitchen is small but not that small, and Bucky is orchestrating some of those light touches but not all of them. It makes him flush warmly to think of Steve dancing the same steps, gently stepping just a little closer than necessary every time he needs to turn, to get something, to move.

When the fish comes out of the oven Steve does a very good job of pretending not to anxiously watch Bucky’s every move. He doesn’t need to worry; the fish is wonderful, although Bucky suspects that is more due to the fish itself and not necessarily Steve’s mastery over spices. Bucky hadn’t even bought spices; he’d had salt and that was about it.

“It’s good,” he says, in an attempt to put Steve out of his misery, and it seems to work – Steve brightens immediately, leans closer.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I’d eat it again.”

Steve _glows_ , pleased out of his mind. Bucky doesn’t know why Steve is so pleased at this, but it makes Bucky pleased in turn.

“You can, um, stick around,” he offers, despite the part of his brain which is warning him that inviting strangers he’d hallucinated tails on into his house didn’t seem like the best of ideas. “If you want.”

“I’d love to,” Steve says immediately, which naturally is when Bucky realises he has pretty much nothing for the pair of them to do.

“I don’t really –” he mutters, gesturing. “I mean, I don’t have much to do.”

“That’s okay,” Steve says, cheerful. “You just moved in, right? We can decorate.”

“We can?”

“We can make plans to decorate,” Steve says. “If you want. But first we can take a nap.”

“We can?” Bucky asks again, and Steve reaches out, touches Bucky’s cheeks, just beneath his eyes.

“You’ve got bags under your eyes,” he says. “You’re not sleeping well.”

“I – feel fine,” Bucky says, but he doesn’t protest further as Steve tugs them to the couch and pulls him into lying down. It feels nice, to lie down pressed against the warmth of another body. It feels – not familiar, exactly, but as though it should be. Feels like a place he could stay forever. It’s not long before he slips into sleep.

Once again, he loses track of how much time passes as he stays like that, dozing against Steve. He thinks he might slip even further downwards into true sleep as well, a few times, even though Steve is a relative stranger and Bucky is at his most vulnerable when he is asleep. He doesn’t know how much time has passed when Steve starts to wiggle himself out from underneath Bucky, whispering apologies the entire way and mumbling something about needing to recharge.

After that, though, Bucky finds that he can’t fall back into sleep particularly well, that his brain has decided it’s time for him to become fitful and restless. It’s not terribly surprising that he barely counts out two minutes before he’s standing up and stretching, ambling after Steve.

The sound of water running draws him to the bathroom, and the cracked-open door is what gets Bucky to pause.

“Steve?” he calls.

“Mhmm?”

“You alright?”

“Fine,” Steve’s voice says, and he certainly _sounds_ happy enough, but Bucky can hear the odd splashing noise that has him nervous because he can’t quite tell what it is. From what he can hear it seems like Steve is filling up the tub, which is slightly odd, but the splashing beneath it is deeper, something he can’t identify.

Of course he looks inside; the door’s been left open, for fuck’s sake.

Steve is in Bucky’s bathtub. He – well, he has no shirt on, is the first, unlikely thing that Bucky notices. The first thing he _should_ have noticed was that hanging out of the bathtub is that same tail Bucky has been worried that he hallucinated all afternoon.

“You – tail,” he gets out, intelligently. Steve frowns, flicks it up in the air, makes that same rippling, splashing noise with the broad edge of it that Bucky isn’t sure human hands could replicate.

“It’s a bit big for this bathtub,” he says. “I’ll clean up the mess.”

“The – the mess,” Bucky sputters, “isn’t what I’m worried about, it’s, it’s – you had legs! Just a minute ago, I _saw_ you.” 

Steve frowns at him. “Well, yes,” he says. “I can’t swim around on land. And I said I’d come back and see you, and I can’t do that with a tail…”

“You have a tail in the water and legs on land,” Bucky says. Steve nods. “Please,” Bucky says, “next time you have a reveal like that, _tell me about it first_.”

Steve, at least, has the decency to look contrite. “I’ll try,” he promises, and flicks water at Bucky. Bucky only feels slightly bad about swearing and trying (unsuccessfully) to duck the droplets.

“Can I ask why you’re repurposing my bathtub?” he asks. Steve splashes his tail again – thankfully not at Bucky, this time – and beckons for him to come closer.

“I get dry out of water,” he says, while Bucky obliges him and gets closer like the fool he is. “I can go a pretty long time without it, but it’s itchy and annoying and I don’t like it.” Then, without giving Bucky a chance to respond, he leans over the edge of the tub and pulls Bucky into the water. His grip is slippery and would’ve been easy to twist out of, but for some reason Bucky chooses not to, lets himself be tipped into his own bathtub and tucked next to Steve’s bulk.

“Hm,” Bucky mutters, immediately regretting this. He reaches down and peels his now-soaked socks off.

“Yes, good,” Steve says. His tail winds around Bucky’s closest leg in a way that is almost concerningly supple. “We can keep sleeping here.”

“If you say so,” Bucky concedes, helplessly, hopelessly amused, and that is how he ends up asleep in his bath with a fish tail wrapped around his leg and a Steve pressed to his side.

~*~

“Wait,” Bucky says drowsily, not quite awake, light filtering through his cracked-open eyelids when his drowsy dozing brings him back to a place that could be approximated for consciousness, “you _are_ a mermaid.”

“Yes,” Steve says, sounding much more awake than Bucky is, which raises the question of what he’s still doing here, pressed close, but, well, Bucky’s not one to count his blessings.

“How were you going to pay for my groceries?” Bucky asks. “How’d you get money?”

“Oh,” Steve says, “shipwrecks.”

Bucky opens his eyes further, lets himself squint at Steve. “Shipwrecks?”

“They have coins in them,” Steve says helpfully. “Well, sometimes,” he amends. “Here –” He leans over the side of the bath, digs around at the shirt crumpled on the floor next to him. “Coin.” He’s holding a gold coin.

“Uh,” Bucky says, and takes it. It’s gold, he’s fairly sure, even if he’s not sure when or where he learned to authenticate gold. “Um.”

“It _is_ a coin,” Steve says suspiciously.

“Well, yes,” Bucky says. “But this is…not used as currency.”

“They’re not?” Steve asks, and bless him, he sounds disappointed as all hell. “But – they’re coins?”

“They’re old coins,” Bucky says. “We change our money system every – few years, I guess, I don’t know. Did you see what I paid with?”

“The green paper?”

“That’s money now,” Bucky says, deeply thankful that he had remembered what money was, even if he hadn’t registered the fact as he paid for things. Steve slides downwards in the tub, and Bucky can feel his sulk in the movement.

“Well, that’s dumb,” he mutters.

“If it makes you feel better, this is probably worth quite a bit,” Bucky tells him. “I’m pretty sure it’s, uh, solid gold.”

“But you can’t use it,” Steve complains.

“Yeah, good thing I paid for own groceries, huh,” Bucky mumbles, still staring at the coin in his fingers. His memory is starting to ping, something about a dealer who will probably be ecstatic to get his hands on this. Bucky is pretty sure he’s met the guy before. Gotten intelligence from him on a source? His face swirls and shifts in Bucky’s mind: an aquiline nose, a long straight line, narrowed eyes, wide eyes.

Steve grumbles, pulling Bucky out of his thoughts. The sound makes him smile. 

“I’m pretty sure there are people who’d buy this for quite a bit,” he says. “I don’t know _who_ , exactly, but they exist. Probably.”

“People will buy anything,” Steve says dismissively. “The problem is getting a good amount of money for it.”

Bucky turns, stares. “How do you know that?”

“Peggy told me,” Steve says. “She and her husband lived here before you.”

“Huh,” Bucky says. “What happened to her? Why’d she move out?”

“She went to a nursing home,” Steve reports.

“Huh,” Bucky says again. That’d explain why the house was empty, then, he guesses. He’s kind of glad that SHIELD hadn’t forced the previous occupant out. Or maybe they had, and stuck her in a nursing home. SHIELD would probably do something like that. He might not know much but he knows enough not to trust intelligence agencies. He’s pretty sure HYDRA had designated themselves an intelligence agency. He shudders.

“Who’d pay for this,” Steve mumbles, taking the coin back and bouncing it in the membrane between his fingers, from one to the other and back again. Bucky winces a little at the sight, but it doesn’t seem to hurt. “Are you sure you don’t have Internet? You can look up anything on it.”

It’s an odd feeling, being educated about human things by a mermaid. “Um, no,” Bucky says. He’d had no need of the internet on a mission, only cameras and bugs. Steve hums again.

“I think you do have it,” he says decisively. “Peggy had it here. You just need a computer to get on it.”

Computer, Bucky is familiar with. That’s how he’d been briefed. That was how he monitored his target, not that much monitoring had been needed before he’d established the target’s routine and found a good vantage point. He hasn’t the slightest idea of where to get one.

“Hm,” he says again, in lieu of relating any of this to Steve.

Steve frowns a little, contemplative. “We could ask the neighbours,” he suggests. Bucky does not have any rebuttal to this, which is how he finds himself dragged out of the tub and into the house of someone called Luis, who talks at a mile a minute and is overjoyed to see Steve again, because it’s been too long, man, where does he hide himself and he needs to visit more. Once they get him on the subject of gold coins, Luis totally knows someone who will pay for that, no questions asked, and if Bucky found anymore he’d pay _more_ , because this coin looked authentic as fuck and probably should be in a museum somewhere and was probably worth a hell of a lot and where had Bucky gotten this, exactly?

“Oh, I don’t know,” Bucky says, once it becomes clear that Luis actually wants an answer to this question. “Steve’s the one crazy enough to be diving in this weather.”

Steve pinches his side and Bucky twists away with a barely muffled yelp. Luis nods enthusiastically and starts good-naturedly berating Steve for doing something as dumb as swimming in the cold fucking Atlantic because that was frankly dumb as shit, had Steve never heard of frostbite, or crashing into icebergs, because Luis knew a cousin who knew a guy whose sister-in-law had had the misfortune of going to the Arctic one time for a research trip and, swear to God, her left nipple had frozen off, not to mention her pinkie and also her fourth toe, maybe, it’s been a while since they’ve talked.

“My nipples are fine,” is what Steve manages to very intelligently say in response.

“Not for long if you keep up that swimming, my dude,” Luis says, a little too cheerfully for the situation at hand. Bucky has seen Steve shirtless and he can say, privately and in the recesses of his mind, that it’d be a great shame if Steve lost either of his nipples, no matter how much money his gold coins are worth.

Luis sends the two of them off with a promise to get in touch with a quote and/or a third cousin who works for a pirate museum and knows more about authenticating and buying this kinda stuff than the three of them combined, probably, which is a fair assessment.

“He knows _so many people_ ,” Steve says as they leave. “If anyone was going to know someone who’ll pay for this stuff, it’s him.”

“How do you know him?” Bucky asks, still a little bowled over by the rapid flow of words he’d just been caught up in.

“I come into the village sometimes,” Steve says. “Hang around and get to know people. Luis is always the first one to talk to the weird guy wandering around and watching them all.”

This, Bucky decides, is almost alarmingly believable.

~*~

The gold coin goes for a frankly ridiculous amount of money to Luis’s third cousin, who almost dies with happiness at the sight of it and begs them for any more they can find, frozen nipples or no. Steve is inordinately pleased with this, digs up a ridiculous amount of more coins, and proceeds to give all the money to Bucky.

“What do I need with coins?” he asks, pulling out the big blue eyes every time Bucky so much as opens his mouth to protest. “I don’t, I live in the ocean, these green things are ridiculous and soluble.” 

Bucky squints at him suspiciously. “I’m pretty sure dollar bills aren’t soluble,” he says. Then, because he’s curious, he submerges a few bills in his sink and raises an eyebrow at Steve when they don’t dissolve.

“That’s not the point,” Steve says, dignified. “The point is that I want you to have a computer.”

And then he pulls out his big blue eyes and Bucky caves and asks Luis to buy him a computer. Which Luis does, with great glee and many eloquent expressions of astonishment that Bucky has been able to live for so long without a computer.

“The trick,” he says as he types like a fiend, “is to go with non-mainstream makers. They make shit that’s just as good for about half the price and they don’t even have that ugly-ass apple on the back, you’re winning the fuck out of computers with that kind of deal, let me tell you.”

“Okay,” Bucky says. His computer comes in the mail the next day – Luis had insisted on priority shipping because it hurts him to think of Bucky in that big house without a computer, it really did – and Steve jumps on the package with clear delight.

“Hah,” he says triumphantly, “five bars! Peggy told me that was the best,” he says to Bucky, and starts browsing – Bucky squints. Home improvement blogging? The webpages come thick and fast, everyone linking to everyone else. How To Fix Power Sockets. How To Make Your Own Cool Window Shades. How To Re-Tile Your Floors With Only Seventeen Different Materials, Just Kidding, It’s Five. 

“I don’t think the floors need re-tiling,” Bucky says. Steve sighs, immensely put-upon, and closes that particular tab. He’s in so deep that it barely makes a difference.

~*~

Steve scoffs yet again. He’s taken the browsing through the internet lying on Bucky’s bed and with his tail out, so Bucky is treated not only to scornful noises but to scornful tail movements that muss his sheets. Unfairly, the sheets seem fine with this, for all that they glare when _Bucky_ is the one to muss them.

“I could do better than this,” Steve mutters at the computer screen.

“What is it this time?” Bucky asks. Steve turns the computer around and shows Bucky what is probably an artist’s rendering of an underwater scene. He’s been browsing through the internet for pictures to hang in the wall, and he hasn’t found anything that takes his fancy. “You could try,” Bucky suggests.

“Try what?”

“The art,” Bucky says. “There’s a little craft shop in town.”

Steve sits up immediately, eyes wide and eager. “Really?” he asks. Bucky shrugs, nods, and seemingly in the next instant finds himself in the aforementioned craft store, Steve bouncing along the aisles, practically vibrating with excitement.

“Painting or drawing?” he demands. Bucky shrugs.

“Start with drawing?” he tries, but Steve buys the materials and equipment for both anyway.

Steve is _ridiculously_ good at art, they find quickly. He has just the right balance of careful observation, good hand-eye co-ordination, and a general sense of not giving a fuck. He starts off by copying the unsatisfactory designs he’d found online and following videos of a very calm man who never seems to have anything unpleasant to say, and then he branches out, drawing things that can only have come from his own experiences, painting patterns and landscapes that seem almost otherworldly.

“You’ve done this before,” Bucky accuses, and Steve shrugs.

“Peggy gave me a sketchbook,” he says. “I don’t know what happened to it, but I liked drawing.”

“You could have asked, you know,” Bucky says, a little hesitantly. “If you wanted to draw. You could have asked.”

Something about Steve goes a little softer, in response to that. “I’ll remember,” he says.

~*~

“Can you – can you draw someone specific?” Bucky asks Steve one day, watching the fast, light movements of his pencil over paper.

“From a description?” Steve asks.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Or, well, I might be able to find a picture online.” He had been treated to a mostly unwanted tutorial on how to use Google Images, the day before. Also Pinterest, which seemed to go on forever.

“Who?” Steve asks, fingers poised over the computer.

“Becca – uh, Rebecca Barnes.” Bucky’s heart feels like it going to beat out of his chest as Steve hums and frowns, tilts his head at his screen appraisingly.

“There’s a lot of Rebecca Barneses,” he says, almost apologetically.

“No, yeah, there would be,” Bucky says, shaking his head in an attempt to get rid of the heaviness in his heart. Steve turns the screen anyway and Bucky leans forward, but – the Rebecca Barnses he sees are all adults, most of them well into middle age, and Bucky has a dreadful moment of wondering whether he’d even recognise his sister if he saw her with lines in her face and grey in her hair before Steve slams the computer shut and slaps his sketchbook over it. “Tell me what she looked like,” he demands, and Bucky – well, mostly drags himself out of his gloom to do so.

Steve’s brow furrows as he draws, and it’s about the only part of his face that remains visible as he hunches over the page. Whenever Bucky speaks, though, he looks up, face entirely and utterly serious through some of Bucky’s incoherent rambling. When incoherent rambling tips into true senselessness, he leans over and takes Bucky’s wrist, very gently, just holds him and grounds him until he can take a breath and fall silent, heart hammering.

Bucky very much wants to kiss him. It’s a slow, dawning realisation, as he stares at the hand that’s still covering his. He wants to press close to Steve again, close and closer until they can crawl into each others’ bodies and rest. Outside, the sea crashes. 

He’s thought, so many times, that Steve belongs in the sea. The fact that he’s currently swinging legs beneath his chair doesn’t change that. Bucky takes another breath, and turns his mind back to his sister, to this art.

He doesn’t make himself stop staring, though, as Steve continues to draw. Bucky feels like he’s trying to memorise everything _Steve_ : the creases in his face, the grip of his hand, the soft movements of his sketching versus the harsh, almost annoying movements of his erasing. The shifting colour of his eyes as they’re alternately lit up and cast into shadow as he moves his head.

When he gets to see the finished product – well, Bucky’s pretty sure he’s not biased, but the drawing that flows out of Steve’s pencil then is his best, he’s sure of it. Steve takes Bucky’s stuttering half-insensible descriptions and spins it into something their eyes can make sense of, something that’s solid and true and Becca staring up at him from the wispy lines that shape her. It’s all Bucky can do not to touch the soft lines, all he can do not to smudge them.

He puts it up that night, a little after Steve has left for the sea, in pride of place in the living room: visible from pretty much every angle except directly beneath it. It seems so natural to him, to have it there, and yet when Steve comes in the following morning and sees it he yelps and freezes.

“What?” Bucky asks, hurriedly poking his head out of the kitchen. Steve points, apparently still wordless, at the painting on the wall. “Oh,” Bucky says, ducking his head. “It’s yours. D’you like it?”

“It’s _mine_ ,” Steve repeats. “It’s not nice enough to be up here!”

“Hey,” Bucky says, a little offended at this. “It’s gorgeous. I like it. And wasn’t that the point, to make something for the wall?”

“I – have made a mistake,” Steve says, the very picture of dismay.

“It’s lovely and I’m glad to have it,” Bucky tells him. “But if you want me to take it down, I will.”

Steve mumbles something that sounds like, “You can keep it if you want to,” before fleeing into the kitchen. “I think your pancake is burning,” he says, in a much more normal tone, and finds it in himself to grin as Bucky swears and tries to scrape charred batter off his pan.

Once again, Becca seems to change things for Bucky; having her picture up makes him want the house she’s in to be nicer. There are holes in walls and the polish on the ground is wearing thin and the windowsills are in a state of ruin, and that is not the house Bucky wants his sister to be presiding over. He finds himself asking Steve to find him instructions from the internet and puts himself to work: re-polishing the wood, new shutters for the windows, filling holes in the walls.

Somehow, the house fills up as he works: paintings, drawings, framed and hung or placed on a newly steady table. He finds himself buying frames by the handful every time he goes to the hardware store for something. Throw cushions make their way onto the couch, because Steve complains about his back. Jackets and blankets follow much the same path, because it turns out that while merfolk might be able to regulate the water temperature around them, they cannot do the same with air, and they’d both found out that Steve gets grumpy when he’s cold.

They’re useless things, but Bucky finds that he likes them. He can spend minutes on end just looking at the things Steve’s created; wrapping himself in layers of blankets is comforting, if tactically unsound and physically ineffective. It reminds him of Steve, draped over his fainting couch with all of him swaddled in fluffy things except the broad swathe of his tail.

And, once he grows used to the more cosmetic changes, the fixing of what was already there, he finds himself starting to make more substantial chances, bringing in new things: he sees an old fainting couch from the secondhand furniture store and buys it, half before he knows what he’s doing. He goes to a warehouse three towns over and buys a bathtub about twice as big as the one he has now. It’s not until he’s installed the thing that he properly realises that most of his changes have been – well, to accommodate Steve.

He can’t exactly shrug that off. He tries not to think about it, instead. Steve goes back to the ocean every night because that’s where he belongs, no matter how large a tub Bucky might be able to provide him. 

It is around the same time that Bucky retrieves and installs a bathtub that Steve begins to embrace the house as his own: with Bucky’s encouragement he paints the shutters in swirling green-blue patterns that seem to move when Bucky’s not looking directly at them, to paint the window frames a gradient that matches his tail, a deep lovely blue that lightens to a sky-like colour near the bottom. It’s easy enough, in the face of Steve’s dazzling paint-stained grin, to file away every thought about his leaving.

~*~

“You’re not sleeping,” Steve says from the front door, one morning. It’s a testament to how run-down Bucky is that he jumps, turns towards the door he hadn’t realised was open.

“I – I’m fine,” he says, even though he’s, well, not. He’d woken up in the middle of the night and come into the living room; he has to clutch the memory of his sister close, right now, because there are other, less pleasant things he’s starting to remember, that he’d rather not think about. Becca stares out at him from the paper, her pencil gaze gentle in a way Bucky probably does not deserve.

“You’re not,” Steve says. “You’re not sleeping. What’s wrong?”

Bucky scrapes his hands over his face, doesn’t look back at Becca. “Just…remembering things,” he mutters.

“Not like Becca,” Steve says, half a guess. The grin that twists at Bucky’s lips probably shouldn’t even be classified as such.

“Not like Becca,” he scrapes out.

“What, then?” Steve asks, coming closer, and for all that Bucky doesn’t want to tell him, doesn’t want him to hear, the words come bubbling out of his chest anyway.

“Killing people,” he says, very quietly. “Training little girls to kill people.” He makes the mistake of shifting, and the light that’s starting to filter through the window glints off his metal arm. He tries and fails not to flinch, staring down at it.

Steve sucks in a breath, but – that idiot – he just starts coming closer, walking towards Bucky.

“Don’t,” Bucky says tiredly, but Steve doesn’t make it a habit to listen to Bucky and probably isn’t going to start now.

“And did you do it because you wanted to?” Steve asks, his hand coming up to Bucky’s shoulder and just resting there. “You enjoyed it?”

Bucky keeps his mouth shut, and Steve takes it as confirmation of his beliefs. Because Steve is infuriating like that.

“I don’t think it was your fault,” he murmurs. “Bucky, I – I know you. You wouldn’t have done that. Not of your own free will.” He moves to stand in front of Bucky, to tip Bucky’s head upwards, and – he’s standing in front of the window, and the light comes in from around his edges so that he _glows_. It’s absurd, but – it feels as though Bucky’s being absolved by a deity, in that moment.

He wants to lower his head and kiss the hand against his chin, he thinks. He wants – he wants a lot of things he can’t have, clearly.

“Do mermaids marry?” he asks, abrupt, because he needs the reminder that this is something he can’t have. Steve tilts his head, settles onto his fainting couch and resettles into his tailed form with a sigh.

“I don’t know if you would call it that,” he says. “We – choose to be with someone, and then we are. Usually it’s – it’s for the rest of our lives. We believe that there’s a someone out there for everyone, but,” he shrugs, “it’s not like we have proof of that.”

“Sounds like marriage to me,” Bucky says, and Steve shrugs.

“If you want to call it that,” he says.

“And what do you do, once you’re – together?” Bucky asks. Steve shrugs again.

“Live together,” he says. “Travel together. Spend time together.”

“Merfolk travel a lot?” Bucky asks, and he’s sure that neither of them are unaware of how his voice is tightening.

“Depends on the merfolk,” Steve says neutrally. “I used to. Now I stay in one place.”

Bucky hums, stares up at the ceiling. “The ocean is so big,” he says, almost dreamily.

“Lonely, too, sometimes,” Steve says quietly, and Bucky turns his head to look at him, at that beloved face. How could he keep a merman from the ocean? Steve is just – passing the time, is all. He’s lucky to have had this much time with Steve, and yet he’s greedy for more.

Steve seems to draw himself inwards, tilts his head. “You’re upset?”

“Just – tired,” Bucky manages to choke out. Thankful, bizarrely, for the excuse, he gestures at his own face, where he knows there are dark circles under his eyes. “Didn’t sleep well. Like you guessed.”

“Take a nap?” Steve suggests, and Bucky shrugs.

“Think I’ll try,” he says. “Sorry for skipping out on you.”

Steve waves him off. “I thought I’d try painting the tablecloth, today.”

“Have fun,” Bucky gets out, and then he slams himself face-first into his own bed and tells himself very sternly to stop thinking about his – about _Steve_ , because Steve has places to go and merfolk to meet and even if he didn’t Bucky would still be lightyears away from having anything with him. The very reason Steve had come up to meet him was something like pity, he reminds himself, and that’s the thought he falls into a restless sleep on.

When he wakes up, Steve is tucked next to him. Because why wouldn’t he be, Bucky thinks almost bitterly. He lets his head drop and closes his eyes, tries to breathe in without feeling like he’s breathing in Steve, that sea-salt scent that clings to him, just another reminder of where he belongs (the sea) and where is _doesn’t_ belong (kept in a house, with Bucky).

~*~

Bucky wakes up every morning with new blood on his hands. It seems like the list of things he has done is endless and red and bloody. Steve takes to sleeping with him instead of going back to the sea at night, tucking their bodies together until Bucky calms, even in his sleep, and his dreams turn to better places. When they wake up in the morning, Steve will pry until Bucky’s mouth comes free with a gasp and he’s able to talk about what he dreamed of.

“You shouldn’t have to do that,” he tries to say, once, and Steve pins him with a glare so fierce that it renders him silent again. And, well, it’s hard for him to protest when he feels so soft, each morning, so at peace.

“Then let me at least come with you to the beach,” Bucky argues, which is how he finds himself waist-deep in freezing water while Steve swims literal circles around him. He’s so graceful in the water, so fast, that sometimes all Bucky can see of him is a glimpse of shining scales before he’s darted out of sight again, into deeper waters.

He always comes back, though. Rises out of the water with his hair plastered wet to his skull and a grin on his face that shines through the morning greyness. It makes Bucky’s heart twinge to see him so happy, so in his element.

Steve will always try and hold his metal hand as they walk back up the beach, after hearing about how it had been used so often as a weapon. 

~*~

“I’ve run out of things to paint,” Steve says one afternoon, having just finished with the kitchen cabinets on the wall. Bucky looks up at the words, and dread settles in the pit of his stomach as he sees Steve contemplating his work, sitting on the counter with his tail smacking gently, rhythmically, against the cupboards that he’s already painted.

“The day had to come, huh?” he asks, looking back down, focusing fiercely on his knees. _As much_ , he struggles to keep to himself, _as I wish it wouldn’t_. “I guess it was a mistake to let you have your way with the house,” comes out instead.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he can see Steve’s head turn, but he can’t see the expression he’s wearing, which is fine. That’s fine.

“It was?” Steve asks.

“It’s just that everything’s going to remind me of you,” Bucky says. The patterns on the wall, the pictures he’s hung, the paint on the window shades and tablecloth and even the ceiling. There isn’t a direction he can so much as glance at without being reminded of Steve. “I’m glad of it,” he adds, maybe a little too fierce for the moment, but it’s _true_. He’d so much rather be reminded of Steve than to never have met him. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m – very glad for it.”

“Remind you of me?” Steve asks, and when Bucky loses the battle with himself and looks up Steve is trying to fight away a frown. “Where am I going?”

Bucky stares. If this was anyone else, he thinks, this would be cruel of them. “Back to the sea,” he forces out. “Back to your _home_.”

Steve seems to shrink back even as Bucky looks at him. “You don’t want me here?” he asks. His voice is – tiny.

“Of course I want you here,” Bucky snaps. “But you don’t – you –”

“Don’t tell me what to do –”

“So what, you’re happy like this,” Bucky challenges, almost a dare. “This is fine by you.” He gestures at – well, everything about Steve’s current situation, the way he’s perched uncomfortably against the edge of the countertop, the way his tail drags on the floor as it moves.

“I –”

“Besides,” Bucky says, forcibly cheerful, “you’re the one who just said you’re out of stuff to paint.”

“So what,” Steve says, “I’m only here to _paint_? What am I, some artist you hired? I’ll repaint everything,” he says loudly, over Bucky’s stuttering. “I’ll paint the outside of the house. I’ll make a mosaic on the floor. I want to stay for as long as you want me, and when you want me gone I’ll leave. But not before,” he says. “Not before then.”

Bucky can only stare at him. “You have a whole life in the sea,” he says. It’s absurd, the idea that he can offer Steve anything compared to that. “You – you have your someone to find. What do I –”

“You’re my someone!” Steve snaps. His tail thrashes restlessly, nearly tips him over, and Bucky freezes. “You’re my someone,” Steve repeats, quieter. “Your tears – people cry into the sea all the time, Buck. I only ever wanted to come to you. And you –” he smiles helplessly. “You’re so gentle. You care so much. How – how could I not love you?”

_Love you_ Bucky mouths. He doesn’t think he has the air to speak. His chest feels like it’s imploding.

“And you didn’t _tell me_ –” he finally manages to wheeze.

“I didn’t know how! Humans don’t have – have someones, not like that. And then you asked, and I told you, and you looked so _angry_ – and it’s not like _you_ told _me_ –”

“Oh, no –”

“And, I don’t know, you’ve been forced into enough,” Steve says. He wraps his arms around himself, and Bucky feels like – the worst kind of person, for doing this. “I didn’t – I don’t want to be another thing you’re forced into.”

Bucky looks down, scrubs at his face again. Tries to reconcile the devastation he’d felt just moments before with the wild hope that’s beating through his heart now.

“I’ll go,” Steve says, pulling him out of his thoughts. “I’m sorry. I’ll – go.”

“No!” Bucky says, almost on the verge of yelling. He can’t lose Steve _now_. He lunges forward into the kitchen, successfully pinning a now-human-shaped Steve against the kitchen bench.

“No –?”

“You don’t _even_ know how long I’ve been pining,” Bucky snaps. “Didn’t I say, did I not say, please, next time you have a reveal like this, _tell me_ –”

Steve cuts him off with a kiss. It’s weird, at first, because Bucky is mid-word and his mouth takes a minute to catch up with what’s happening, and then Steve tilts his head and pushes a forward just a little and oh, yes, that’s good. That’s – very good. Bucky barely realises that his hand as moved to cup Steve’s cheek until Steve reaches up and grabs it, like he’s afraid Bucky will move once he’s realised.

“You kiss like the sea,” is what comes out of Bucky’s dumb mouth, once they’ve pulled away from each other. Steve smiles, touches Bucky’s cheek.

“How?”

“So – there, all the time,” Bucky murmurs, leaning his head against Steve’s. “So steady and strong and maybe a little dangerous, underneath.”

“Not to you,” Steve says, instead of denying it. Then, “Do I taste like salt?”

Bucky blinks. “What?”

“I mean, I don’t know, I’m curious,” Steve says. “I come from the sea, you said I kiss like the sea, maybe I taste like salt. I can’t tell.”

“I think,” Bucky says slowly, “more data is required to answer that question.”

Steve nods seriously. “That’s fair,” he says, already leaning in. He doesn’t have far to lean.

~*~

Steve isn’t best pleased when Bucky promptly announces that he’s going on a day trip and that no, Steve can’t come.

“You can’t leave me _now_ ,” he complains, tail smacking the fainting couch. “It’s been a _day_ , we’re not out of the honeymoon period yet, you’re ruining the honeymoon period.”

“I’m going to improve the honeymoon period,” Bucky promises. “You’ll know what the fuck I’m up to as soon as I come back.” He even dares to lean forward, to press a quick kiss against the corner of Steve’s mouth. His pout lessens very slightly, and it’s such a thrill, that Bucky is allowed to do this. “Stop complaining, and stop drying yourself out,” he chides, not entirely seriously. 

Steve grumbles again and marches down to the sea. He’s so grumpy that he entirely forgets to put on clothes while he makes his way to the water, which is simultaneously hilarious and makes Bucky feel bad enough that he almost caves, but – he wants this to be a surprise. He’s fairly sure Steve will like it. 

~*~

Steve is still in the sea when Bucky comes back, a few hours later and down quite a bit of money. Luis helps him to get the surprise off the top of the car, still scolding him for buying something as relatively un-seaworthy as this because quality was important and Bucky’s drowning would be a pain in his ass and also what the hell was Bucky doing buying one of these when winter was coming anyway, had he not heard Luis that time he’d told Steve about his cousin’s friend’s sister-in-law? The sea was a dangerous mistress and frankly they were all better off safely on dry land where, if he could say so, they had evolved to live in the first place.

“It’s not like I’m going to start a nomadic existence on the sea with this thing,” Bucky mutters as he carries it down to the beach.

“I sure hope not, man, you’d be shipwrecked in the first three days and we do not have the resources to mount a rescue mission in this little town of ours,” Luis starts. “Are you carrying that on one shoulder?”

“Uhhh,” Bucky says. “No?”

“Alright, I get it,” Luis says, and winks. It’s something of a feat, because Bucky himself doesn’t get it, but Luis just gets back in his car and waves, shouting encouragement to come and visit him sometime and not to take too long about it because cooping himself up in a little house so far away from everything wasn’t good for the soul.

Bucky doesn’t have the slightest idea of how to work a rowboat, but that’s alright. He just pushes the thing into the sea and flops into it. It was a good plan, he thinks, but the boat washes back onto shore almost immediately, much to his dismay.

Slowly and painstakingly, he pushes himself out to sea with what is definitely not correct technique: planting his oars in the sand and pushing. The oars in question creak protestingly, a few waves crash into the boat and soak his shoes, and he realises a few metres out that he could probably get out and push with far greater success. But he’s committed now, and he gets pretty far out before he loses the ground under him, so he counts it as a win, really, and starts dragging the oars back in the boat. 

The second oar is snatched out from his grip, and he only grins. A second later Steve surfaces, oar held tightly and a smile warring with a frown on face.

“Is this the surprise?” he asks, surveying the little boat that Bucky’s sitting in.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “What d’you think?”

“I think…” Steve trails off. “I think you make it hard to be angry with you,” he says eventually. “And I think you’re bad at rowing,” he adds, just a little peevish still.

Bucky grins at him. “You know how to row?”

“How hard can it be?” Steve asks, and drags himself into the boat to demonstrate, nearly capsizing them in the process. Bucky has to fling himself to the other side to stop them from tipping over, but at last they get settled and Steve fits the oars in the oarlocks, starts swinging them around. Something about watching Steve flail around seems to unlock Bucky’s own procedural memory in a way that flailing around himself had not.

“You’re not – no, that’s not how,” Bucky says, grabbing the oars and settling into a rhythm.

“That’s because this is dumb and inefficient,” Steve complains, but he drapes himself over the bow, lets his tail swish through the water as Bucky moves them to nowhere in particular. He keeps rowing until they reach the place where the ocean lies undisturbed, without so much as the rippling beginnings of a wave, so much farther out than he’s ever been before. Steve tips his head backwards to look at Bucky.

“Now how’s the honeymoon period?” Bucky asks, and Steve can’t quite suppress his smile. An upside-down smile is an unexpectedly precious sight, so really it’s only reasonable that Bucky lean forward to press a kiss to the nose just below it.

“It’s alright, I suppose,” Steve deigns to say, once he’s right-side-up again. His tail flicks water at Bucky. “Nice to be out at sea with you.”

“Luis said something while we were looking at boats,” Bucky says. Steve raises an eyebrow, and Bucky laughs. “Alright, he said a lot of things, but specifically – that, uh, I could fish. And set up a stall, at that weekly market in town.”

“That’s a nice idea,” Steve says. “Bit less noticeable than coming up with shipwrecked treasure all the time.”

“That’s what I thought,” Bucky says. Steve slides off his perch and resurfaces a few second later at the stern of the boat, pulls himself up and wraps his tail around Bucky’s waist, a warm wet oversized seatbelt. It would be a nice position if it hadn’t piled all their weight on one side of the rowboat, which has the entirely predictable effect of toppling them out of said boat.

“Can you swim?” Steve asks as Bucky sputters against the shock of the cold, even if the water had warmed rapidly around him. Steve’s arms are tight around Bucky’s waist, soft beats of his tail keeping them afloat seemingly effortlessly.

“I don’t know, let me go for a second,” Bucky says, and rolls his eyes at the worried look that Steve gives him. “I’ll shout if I start sinking,” he assures Steve drily, and gets a wrinkled nose in response as the grip around his waist starts to loosen and is removed entirely when it becomes apparent that Bucky’s legs know what to do.

“Will you tell me your name?” Bucky asks, and Steve’s head jerks up, surprise clear on his features.

“What –”

“You said it was hard to say, above water,” Bucky says. “We’re in water now.”

Steve’s face softens, and he motions for Bucky to duck his head under the water, just to his ears. Then he ducks down himself, and – the noise that follows is close to indescribable, an unearthly sort of thing travels clearly through water but would end up sad and flat if Steve tried to say it in air. Bucky dips his mouth underwater, tries to replicate it, and ends up swallowing a mouthful of salt as Steve rises, cackling.

“See if I try to say your name again,” Bucky sniffs through a raw throat.

“ _Please_ don’t,” Steve laughs, comes closer and wraps what feels like his entire self around Bucky in an affectionate hug even as he says, “You accent is the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Ah, but it’s an accent,” Bucky says. “That means I’m saying something.”

“Nothing worth hearing,” Steve assures him. Bucky snorts, and regrets it as his throat protests. He is, he thinks, perfectly happy here: in the sea, wrapped around Steve. Their cottage tiny but bright in the distance, a lighthouse to find their way home by. He’s smiling, he realises, a small and unconscious thing.

“I –” he says, and ducks his head, speaks against Steve’s neck. “I could get used to this, I think.” Steve raises an arm to put his hand against Bucky’s cheek, and Bucky ducks a little to kiss the wrist next to him. He thrills at the sigh it elicits, at the little kiss that’s pressed to his ear in return.

“Good,” Steve says. “Good. That’s all I want.”

“To get me used to this lifestyle?” Bucky asks, and Steve swats him with a soft hand and soft gaze.

“To get you used to being happy,” Steve says, the words barely more than a susurration in the air. Bucky kisses him, for that.

“I’m getting there,” he says. “I’m used to being with you, aren’t I? And you make me happy.”

Even this far out, Bucky can hear the noise of the beach, as though his ears have grown attuned to it, started seeking it out: the waves crash onto the shore, and it holds all the noise and the passion of his heart.

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  (HE'S SO GREAT!! go show [fox](http://thelittleblackfox.tumblr.com) some love!!!)  
>   
> R I P to all the punderful suggestions that fox also provided during the posting of this story:  
> \- surf and turf  
> \- shell yeah  
> \- pier pressure  
> \- ain't that a beach  
> \- unapologetic beach  
> \- beach better have my money  
> \- resting beach face  
> \- so- _fish_ -ticated
> 
> you will be remembered
> 
> come find me at [tumblr](http://layersofsilence.tumblr.com)!
> 
> EDIT - i'm a derpy idiot who managed to post this story twice and did not realise it until eleven hours later, which means i had to delete three wonderful comments. i'm going to screenshot them and reply anyway because it's important to me - i hope you guys get them! i'm sorry for being a goof who posts just before her bedtime, this is what happens when i do that :')


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